by I have just purchased a Seagate ST336737 36.9Gig disk and have it in an
external SCSI box. My system consists of a SPARCstation LX, an external SCSI
enclosure with 2 9-Gig Seagate ST39173WC's, an external enclosure with a
Quantum Empire 2100, the new external enclosure with the Seagate ST336737WC
and a Plextor 12/20 CD. There are no SCSI conflicts and the entire setup
boots just fine.
The problem is that I cannot get the new Seagate to format under the Solaris
8 format command. I have also tried Solaris 7 with the same result. The
auto-configure fails and so I try to manually set up the disk with the
'other' option of the Solaris format command. The session asks numerous
questions which I reply to as follows:
enter # of data cylinders=29848
enter # alternate cylinders=2
enter # of physical cylinders=29850
enter # of heads=4
enter # of physical heads=4
enter # of data sectors/track=256
The data sectors per track is a real problem for me -- the spec sheets for
the drive from seagate says 'Sectors/Track(avg)' is 768, but I can't enter
this figure or I get ''768' is out of range' returned. The only number I can
get to work is 256, but when I finish the format command, the total hard
drive capacity according to the partition information is only like 14 Gig
and this is a 36-Gig(nearly) drive!
Another problem is that when I do get these numbers in and attempt to
partition the hard drive, I get the following errors:
Warning:error setting drive geometry
Warning:error writing VTOC
Not ready error during read
ASC:0X4 ASCQ:0X0
Warning:error reading backup label (several of this and the preceding line)
Warning:no backup labels
Writing label failed
Is there something in the system's BIOS or NVRAM I need to set to recognize
the larger drives? I didn't have this problem with the 9-Gig Seagates and
they autoconfigured just fine. Or are the numbers I'm plugging in all wrong?
Seagate's documentation for this drive is as follows:
Formatted capacity: 36.954 Gb
Number of disks(physical):2
Number of heads(physical):4
Total cylinders:29850
Total tracks:119400
Bytes per sector: 512
Areal density: 16185 Mbits/square inch
Track Density(TPI): 32197 tracks/inch
Recording density(BPI, max): 502682 bits/inch
Sectors/Track(avg): 768
Bytes/Track(avg): 393216
Any ideas?? Any help appreciated -- thanks all.
Ef